The food world lost one of its most enduring figureheads over the weekend when legendary cookbook author Marcella Hazan passed away at age 89 at her home in Florida. A mentor to both luminaries in the professional culinary world as well as home cooks across the nation, Hazan brought simple, unaffected Italian food to the US through a series of six cookbooks, beginning with her seminal The Classic Italian Cook Book, published in 1973. She championed salt, scolded the overuse of garlic and famously made her tomato sauce with just tomatoes, onion and butter.Read More

The transformation turns the space into the first NYRP community garden with high-performance storm water infrastructure. The 3,140-square-foot garden is located at the flood-prone intersection of Carroll Street and Denton Place, an area regularly impacted by storm water runoff and industrial pollutants. NYRP resolved to address the immediate hydrological needs of the neighborhood by retrofitting the garden with permeable pavers, flood-tolerant plants and a rain garden. NYRP also installed a DEP-designed bioswale in the sidewalk adjacent to the garden that manages stormwater runoff from Denton Place and the sidewalk. In total, these components will manage 150,000 gallons of stormwater annually, thereby easing pressure on the Cityâ€™s sewer system and reducing overflows into the Gowanus Canal.Read More

BETTE MIDLER, in Rolling Stone, on whether she’d ever do a nude scene in a film: “I’ll never do a nude scene inÂ pictures, never, ever. They couldn’t pay me enough. Because I don’t want people judging my parts. I would never give the public a chance to judge me in that personal fashion, to say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t exactly throw my wife out of bed over her.’ Let them judge my face, not my parts.

A. “No,” says the Divine Miss M., who no longer drinks alcoholic beverages. “I just didn’t have a tolerance for it.
I’m an extremely cheap drunk and a vocal one. 1 didn’t get enough out of it. It was too high a price to pay … My body couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t take the hangovers. When 1 get a hangover, that pit opens up and 1 might as well just kill myself right then and there. There’s no reason to go on. I’m utterly worthless â€” that’s how it affects me … In the early days, I used to smoke dope and drink stingers before I worked.”Read More